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The Enlightenment front page bears this small announcement: "E17 release HAS HAPPENED!" The release announcement is remarkably spartan — it's mostly a tribute to the dozens of contributors who have worked on the software itself and on translating it into many languages besides system-default English. On the other hand, if you've been waiting since December 2000 for E17 (also known as Enlightenment 0.17), you probably have some idea that Enlightenment is a window manager (or possibly a desktop environment: the developers try to defuse any dispute on that front, but suffice it to say that you can think of it either way), and that the coders are more interested in putting out the software that they consider sufficiently done than in incrementing release numbers. That means they've made some side trips along the way, Knuth-like, to do things like create an entire set of underlying portable libraries. The release candidate changelog of a few days ago gives an idea of the very latest changes, but this overview shows and tells what to expect in E17. If you're among those disappointed in the way some desktop environments have tended toward simplicity at the expense of flexibility, you can be sure that Enlightenment runs the other way: "We don't go quietly into the night and remove options when no one is looking. None of those new big version releases with fanfare and "Hey look! Now with half the options you used to have!". We sneak in when you least expect it and plant a whole forest of new option seeds, watching them spring to life. We nail new options to walls on a regular basis. We bake options-cakes and hand them out at parties. Options are good. Options are awesome. We have lots of them. Spend some quality time getting to know your new garden of options in E17. It may just finally give you the control you have been pining for."

want me to google it for you too?Nah, just go to the homepage and click download?I recommend CentOS rpm.I got a better idea. don't use it. you are probably to lazy to configure it as well, and will endlessly complain while staring at a blank desktop.

These stupid ass distros who are so hard up and anal, they should be the ones who find all these cool apps and programs, and re-package it up into their REPO servers ASAP, or on the day of the release.

If conical wants an app store, PUT all the damn cool shit on it. Not old shit, new shit.

Linux needs a none-distro specific Super Store.

Click download app - dont ask for what distro I am using, figure it out lame asses. Use a app store client that runs on 5 major distros. And can install app XYZ easily, that doesnt break other apps, and that wont stop and get stupid python errors, coz again some lame ass coded his scripts with 2.6, but fails in 2.7. Fix your shit, stop breaking old shit, stop removing old apis, you want to reduce bloat? then dont package up 167 languages that take 89 megs.

They never should have distributed apps together with the core frameworks...

You should have posted this comment in response to the fellow who professes not to be an Apple fanboy, but who does like the way they have managed to make things consistent. Consistency is a gridlock virtue. Some large gorilla at the top of the food chain guesses right often enough to successfully don the "father knows best hat" while receiving adulation rather than contempt from the sharp-thinking in-crowd.

I don't blame you. E17 looks promising but building it has been a real pain in the ass so far. First, I neeeded to d/l, build, and install the dependencies/core libraries (and their dependencies). Even when that part was done and I got through a successful./configure for the main E17, I still ran into errors during the build (most recently, "No rule to make target `illume-keyboard/e-module-illume-keyboard.edj").

Elive [elivecd.org] is Debian with Enlightnment E16 and regularly updated E17 builds. It's a live CD so you can test it out before deciding to install. If you install the leading edge Debian Wheezy, e17 is packaged too [blogspot.com].

The lead dev is on xmas vacation at the moment, but Bodhi 2.2.0 is expected to be released before the new year, and it will come with this release. The current release has an earlier dev release, but it is still very stable and functional. I've been using it on my main system for more than a year.

E was left behind in the window manager wars but it was probably the one that first featured alot of the UI changes that sparked the UI revolution that was the last 12 years. Its good to see they are finally out with a new version and I hope it gains some ground but it would be hard at this point to become the #1 WM. Im sure many of the people who used E in the past will want to try it again but beyond that I dont see it being adopted much. I would probably rather E over Ubuntu's Unity any day (Although i'd take just about any WM over Unity)

Its good to see they are finally out with a new version and I hope it gains some ground but it would be hard at this point to become the #1 WM.

Well, that's one of the great things about Linux, isn't it? That it doesn't matter if it's #1 or not. It just has to exist and be sufficiently interesting. And given the very low friction involved in switching between WMs, it actually can become #1, if it's good enough, even though it doesn't have to.

There are numerous free and opensourced replacement desktop shells for windows. Some are old linux ports.

They are good, because they work and run inside the free MS HyperVisor VM. Which boots into a cmd line plain gui, but no shell. Its easy to install these new shells, to create a working desktop thats linux like, but in windows.

A shell in Windows is not the same as a window manager in Linux. Not in any way. Replacing Windows' shell still leaves you with the exact same window management, it just changes your task bar and desktop shortcuts (and judging from the examples on there: into something far less useful). And Windowblinds isn't even a shell replacement at all!

Am I the only one who interpreted "out" as meaning "abandoned" or "given up on?"

No. Enlightenment was a really promising window manager. I used it from the late 90's until the early 2000's. It was pretty nice even with all of the warts. They kept scrapping it and starting over so many times that I kinda gave up on it. Honestly, I thought it was dead years ago. I figured they finally officially threw in the towel.

Windows managers simply manage your windows. A desktop environment provides libraries, toolkits, services, applications, system configurations, etc. For instance GNOME and KDE are desktop environments that provide access to your hardware devices, network management, etc. Enlightenment is somewhere in-between since it offers some things like libraries to build applications with but I don't know of many native E applications out there. DE's focus on the whole user experience when using an operating system

What's the difference between a window manager and a desktop environment?

Or was it "desktop manager" and "window environment"?

No, seriously, I don't know the difference.

For the end user, not much. Technically, the different is big, and they can be completely separated. A Window Manager will offer a set of features for, literally, manage the Windows on the screen. Even a root menu are not required. A Desktop Manager will offer an application environment and so on. I remember using X11 + Gnome + Enlightenment a few years back. Gnome was a Desktop Manager that required a Window Manager (E was one of the option).

A window manager handles the position and decoration if mere windows. Some simple window managers may offer some extra functionality such as a taskbar or a settings panel.

A desktop environment contains pretty much all you need on top of Linux+X.org: a window manager, user interface APIs, a collection of programs (that go together in terms of appearance and behavior), and service daemons.

10 years too late, I reckon. We've all moved on from this kind of "gratuitous eye candy above all else philosophy" and it's all about consistency, usability, integration, and last but not least, features now.

I found the background jingling relaxing.:D First off it gave me the impression of a busy office with desktop phones ringing in background and stuff. The sound is so faint that it could almost be some encoder noise, but maybe not.

Yo dawg, I hear you like settings, so I put some settings in your settings, so you can set your settings while you set your settings.

This is a highly confusing, very inconsistent desktop environment like program. Items that deal with setting the user interface are all over the place, items that deal with power settings are all over the place, and so on. There are desk top icons/indicators for apparently random things, but for others there isn't one. I'm not comparing E17 to other Unix/Linux/Xwindows alterna

I agree that the video isn't a good example of what the system is really capable of. Snow Linux, which he's using for his demo, has some eccentricities in how it works, and e17 is the red-headed step child of their builds. If you want to see what it's really capable of, then your best bet is to download a distro that shows it off (perhaps a distro that doesn't package anything other than e17 like Bodhi) and play around with it in a VM.

Indeed, things have changed. It's all about huge interface elements that waste space, as little configurability as possible (even if it throws away features that enhance usability) and catering to the lowest common denominator (i.e. people who aren't actually using Linux.)

Eye candy above all else is clearly not their philosophy. Check out their site: "Beauty without sacrifice, and all the options you can eat" is their philosophy. What a wonderful and needed philosophy to introduce into the linux UX ecosystem.

I personally just set up just about any OS like I like it. I just create directories or folders on the desktop, and have links to applications in these. Takes about 2 or 3 seconds to launch whatever I want. It takes about 20 seconds to set up a link. I personally think the GUI has done what it needed for me, in terms of launching applications, almost since it started.

From TFA: "Enlightenment and its libraries are all open source (BSD 2 clause, LGPL or GPL for some executable binaries only). It is a mix because the person who founded each library chose the license, or a license is inherited from some original source." They are trying to integrate into a standard freedesktop.org environment now. I doubt you can do that without utilizing a few GPL library components.

I'll stick with e16 - it does all that I need. Basically, I only use the e16 window manager, along with a GNOME desktop - kind of odd but it works. Even at that, the only features I rely on from e16 are edge-flip and "annihilate" - features that used to exist in Red Hat but were dumped long ago.

No... I suggest you try it out in a virtual machine and see for yourself. What you'll realize is that it's current, and everybody else took a decade to catch up to what Enlightenment was doing in the 90's.

Can anyone explain why some open source* people have a fetish for tiny version numbers? If you are going to spend ten years developing a new version, is that REALLY not worth a primary version number? What is the attraction to having versions as near to zero as possible? In a dotted-decimal notation, why do some people think only the second decimal should be incremented, and at that only once per decade, and the first decimal should remain zero forever?

The primary decimal should be zero when the project is started and should be 1 when it reaches initial functional maturity. Major versions with substantial new features warrant primary-decimal increments. Minor features warrant secondary-decimal increments. Bug fixes warrant tertiary-decimal increments. Otherwise one of the main benefits of the dotted-decimal notation is lost.

As far as I'm concerned: minor: patches - bugfixes and security issues. No new functionality, won't break backwards compatibility
major: new features, but maintain backwards compatibility
primary: major changes, usually including structural stuff under the hood. No backwards compatibility guarantees

So yeah, I don't know why they never increment the primary (to me, at least, 0 means "beta" or below) but I'd disagree that just

I've been using E17 for many years, and every time I try other WM/DE's I keep going back to E17 for one simple reason. The way E17 handles multi-monitors is such a vast improvement over others I don't know why everyone doesn't do it this way. Desktops on each monitor can be independantly switched!

Seriously, I don't know how anyone gets work done with multi-monitor any other way. Being able to switch the contents of a single monitor without switching everything on the other one is just what I always expected for desktop management, and can't understand a situation where I would want to switch both monitor virtual desktops simulaneously ALL the freaking time! This is very similar to getting use to virtual desktops on linux then trying to switch back to the single-desktop of ms windows systems.

Guess that point is not as imporant to most as to me, but I can't imagine doing it any other way without a feeling of something being wrong.

and you spent 0 seconds even trying e17 or reading the page about it that tells you that that needle is the cpu freq.. and if you ever had a battery or care about the whining noise of your fans... you'd care about that needle. if you dont care.. you can remove it. it solves stuff like "my machine performs badly" and have to file a bug with your distro and hope it fixes it.. when a click of a men has it doing exactly what u want. control handed to you. you want to chew through power. want it to sip? ondemand

I thought Bodhi Linux [bodhilinux.com] was already using E17? Was that a pre-release? Does anyone know when Bodhi Linux will get this new release? I'm curious because I'm about to install the new version of Bodhi, and I don't want to install it and then have to re-install it with the newest version in just a couple of weeks.

E17 "previews" (betas or whatever you want to call them) have been available for years, I had it installed as a secondary desktop on both Mageia releases and on Mandriva before that... but the official version number was 16.99. (For the record, KDE is my primary DE, but I also install Enlightenment, XFCE and fluxbox.)

No plans on building from source, I'm sure Mageia will have it up shortly.

Bodhi's been using the nightlies from the e17 project, with a couple of patches to the code to add their options to the menu.

If you install the current version of Bodhi (2.1.0) you'll get a build from a couple of months ago. The nightlies from the current lead up to the release are in testing, and Jeff has said he's going to be getting 2.2.0 out (with this official release) before the new year. That being said, Bodhi's using a semi-rolling release, and if you install 2.1 now, and update through synaptic or

Can I drag a file from a lower, unfocused folder to anywhere without either raising or focusing that folder? You know, like Windows and Mac users have been able to do almost as long as those have existed?

It appears you mean "sloppy focus" from what another poster has written. If that's the case it's been in various window managers for X longer than MS Windows has existed, even if it's not the default in most now.If you can select something you have "focus" on the window the thing you are selecting is in by definition (thus your statement above as written makes zero sense unless you have some different definition that you have not yet outlined to us). Whether it is raised or not when it gets focus is typic

Go to Settings/Advanced/Mu and switch the Polish slider from 62% down to the radio box marked 14.89%, then a checkbox marked "Microsoft Experience" will automatically appear on the left. Select it and type Ctrl-Enter.

Your arguments seem pretty pointless to me. I've compared Enlightenment with all the other desktop environments, and E uses less resources, while doing a prettier and faster job. Run your own tests, against the major DE's. E beats them all.

Enlightenment doesn't compare as favorably against some of the older, lighter desktops, such as XFCE. But, those older lightweight interfaces don't offer quite the "experience" that the heavyweights offer, either.

Bloated eyecandy. Confuses everyone. Phhht. Nonsense. Violates standards? I never researched that - like most users, I'm not as interested in standards, as I am interested in results. Destabilizes the working environment? Needs citations - I've witnessed nothing like that. E is as stable as anything I've used.

Which games are incompatible with E? List them please.

My ONLY complaint with E17, is that it has taken so long. I've been fooling with it for years, impatiently waiting for this release.

Just tried it, 15 minutes later I was back to my much more productive, elegant and less distracting XFCE. Animations for animation sake is not for me. That being said, people seeking eyecandy should give it a try. Thank god for gnu/linux flexibility!

Good that you tried it. I will note that people who find animations distracting can turn it off. Anything and everything is configurable. Of course, there is time involved in figuring out how to configure all that stuff. For my own personal tastes, there is a little to much eye candy enabled by default, but with a little effort I get things just the way I like them.

That said - no desktop can fit everyone's needs and preferences. Some people actually like Unity's out of the box configuration!

On the same note, I believe that many Unity-haters here have not either tried to actually get into it before judging it. They just robotically say that it sucks, because that's the trend. Or they test it with the attitude "remember, this is supposed to suck".

Unity isn't even that far from a standard Win7 / Mac interface, so I think a lot of the hate towards it is not warranted.

Back with e15 it got a reputation for "bloat" because the default theme was there to show off all the whistles, bells, and a dozen desktops with a different background for each. The assumption from there is that you would load whichever one of a couple of hundred lighter themes that looks exactly the way you want and use that as your daily desktop (like the two Rob Malda had available for download before slashdot). Since then the default hasn't quite shown off everything but has "a little too much eye can

You can turn those off too. I use e17 at home mostly because the dual screen behaviour is a bit different to other WMs - you can page through multiple desktops on the left screen while keeping the right on the same desktop. You can also set it to change both at once if that's what you want.I'm still on e16 at work with the same theme I've used since 1998 but I'll use e17 there sometime.

E17 conforms well enough to the freedesktop.org standards. Even though it's not really a standards body, freedesktop.org is readily used by modern window managers, and is becoming a defacto standard. E17 does still store its config in the $HOME/.e directory though, instead of $HOME/.config/e . Can't wait until all unix utils use the.config directory, clearing out the dotfile clutter in the home dir.

Games run perfectly well under E17. I have dozens of games, bought via Humble Bundle, and every one I've tried has worked fine with E17 (barring game bugs, of course). I had a problem once, with keyboard only games not getting focus when they run fullscreen. It's working fine now.

I use E17 on my work computer. Have done so for years. Any instability in my working environment has generally come from me, not the window manager. I think it's only ever crashed once in that time, and even then, I could press F1 to recover (as instructed by the crash dialog), and the window manager restarted itself with all windows intact.

After abandoning CDE, OLVWM, TWM, WindowMaker, AfterStep, and others back in the day for E16, aside from the eye candy there was nothing ever funky about it at all. It was in many ways like the transition between XP and Win7, a few odds and ends not quite how you like, but all in all a significantly better experience. It has been for me one of the most productive environments I've ever used. Virtual desktops, key mapping, sloppy mouse focus, what's not to like about it? E17 allows you to integrate compiz if

The other thing is it's *hugely* customizable. There is no "interface" to e17, per se, but rather a set of tools and widgets that you can use to make your own interface. If you don't like the "interface" it's because you haven't built one you like. Some people do package profiles for it (there's several in Bodhi Linux, for example), but the whole point of e17 is that you can change it if you don't like it.

Back in 2001 I was using e16 on a Win2k desktop via cygwin and X, running the window manager as an application from a linux box on the network. It couldn't do shaped windows (they ended up blocky) but everything else worked.If you really want you could do it on Win8 by running linux in a virtual machine and a decent MS Windows version of X (Xwin32?). Sadly you don't get to manage the local windows that way, just remote stuff, but it looks cool and has some practical uses (multiple desktops that don't cras